Need a 12 port (minimum) sata card

[TeleFragger]

Nice ill get those cables...

Yeah wrong pic. Then that vender has 3 different part numbers listed too!!!

 

[TeleFragger]

Well i missed out on those...

 

[TeleFragger]

Cables havent come in yet.. but i bought 2 of these...
And came with cables...


HP LSI 638834-001 // SAS9205-8i H220 HBA Full Height with Cables | eBay

 

[TeleFragger]

Cables havent come in yet.. but i bought 2 of these...
And came with cables...

HP LSI 638834-001 // SAS9205-8i H220 HBA Full Height with Cables | eBay

and after I posted this cables came in... LOL.. so I will have many cables to choose from.
but im planning on putting 2 of these in my server (server 2016 with stablebit) for 12 more drives (ssd in my server)..
but ill get another card and get 8 more drives in my future freenas box...


probably going to redo my server altogether and go server 2019... albeit essentials role has been crippled so bad that it isn't really what it was (as it seems M$ just wants to get rid of that)...

 

[TeleFragger]

so cards came in and going to install them tomorrow. ive been googling and confused even more. So is this card a SAS9205-8i or 9207-8i?
on Broadcom site I don't see the 9205 listed on downloads but I do see P20 for 9207-8i ...
so im guessing this is the FW I want?
and this is the file I will try...
9207_8i_Package_P20_IR_IT_FW_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows
all in 10h or so...

 

[TeleFragger]

thx all...

just flashed them. googling got me to a link on these forums that you need to use V14 of sas2flash else it will bark saying something doesn't match.. but I'm good.. and now will have 16 sata ports!!!!

Adapter Selected is a LSI SAS: SAS2308_2(Rev 5)
Num Ctlr FW Ver NVDATA x86-BIOS PCI Addr
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
0 SAS2308_2(Rev 5) 15.10.01.00 0f.00.00.15 07.25.05.00 00:06:00:00


weird that windows shows it as a SAS 2 2308 Mustang card...




********* edited
ok after getting the drivers... they show up as H220 adapters now...

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

The LSI support pages turned into a bit of a train wreck after being swallowed up by broadcom, lots of the sub-variants seemed to vanish from the listings (but you can still find them by searching).

2308 is the name of the chip, and if you're using the generic windows drivers I believe that's what they show up as (I've not used these under windows for years now though); if you install a different set of drivers that instead match the PCI ID of your card to a different name, then that's what'll show up but they're all more or less the same underneath. Here's the PCI IDs currently listed for "generic" SAS2308 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2:

0087  SAS2308 PCI-Express Fusion-MPT SAS-2
	1000 3020  9207-8i SAS2.1 HBA
	1000 3040  9207-8e SAS2.1 HBA
	1000 3050  SAS9217-8i
	1014 0472  N2125 External Host Bus Adapter
	1590 0044  H220i
	8086 3000  RS25GB008 RAID Controller
	8086 3060  RS25FB044 RAID Controller
	8086 3516  RMS25JB080 RAID Controller
	8086 3517  RMS25JB040 RAID Controller
	8086 3518  RMS25KB080 RAID Controller
	8086 3519  RMS25KB040 RAID Controller
	8086 351a  RMS25LB040 RAID Controller
	8086 351b  RMS25LB080 RAID Controller

From this post on the FreeNAS forums:

4) Another word of caution: If you are looking for cheaper OEM versions of the LSIs, also beware that the H220 from HP apparently comes in two (three) different versions: one as a rebadged 9207-8i (sometimes 9205-8i) which is a SAS2308 card and probably desirable. However there is also a SAS2208 based one and I think it cannot be flashed to a pure HBA. I have no idea if they can be told apart from part numbers, but I've sent one back that was SAS2208 based.

 

[TeleFragger]

im all up and running.. sweet...

thx for all the help all..

fyi.. I repurposed an old Antec 900 case I had.
Couldn't part with it and tell you what.. is a great setup for this.

I am using the 6 onboard sata connectors for spinning drives
2x h220 sas controllers using all 16 ports.
10x ssd
6x free to fill - room for growth!!!! HAH..






I originally was going to go freenas and zvol2 or whatever but since im still learning it, I don't trust my valuable data there.
I am using stablebit drive pool and ssd cache optimizer.
what I like about this is
* If my system goes down, take the drive out and put it into a new machine and can get data off of if from a hidden share.
* Can do theoretical striping (full file) down to folder level and copies. Depending on amount of drives, you can do that many copies!!!!

thanks again all...
I am going to take my current xeon and get it setup as a FreeNAS box to play around more. Just didn't like that it didn't have a lot of drive bays or I would of used it.